Saturday, 26 July 2008

An 82 year old woman from Southampton was told by staff to stop taking photographs of an empty paddling pool because she might be a paedophile. The logic of this escapes me. First, it isn't clear to me how not taking photographs of children is tantamount to sexual assault. Second, it is desperately worrying that society seems so intent on whipping up hysteria about the danger of child assault from strangers (something that almost never happens) while doing nothing at all to protect children from the overwhelmingly most likely source of assault: their immediate family and their family's friends.

It's not hard to speculate why humans might be prone to illogical hysteria of this kind, but it is disappointing that so many people succumb to it. We aren't prisoners of our genes but sometimes we seem to enjoy acting as though we are.